Fast Fiction

So, I’m doing this Dirty Thirty thing (30 days - a 90 page play) and I’m making admirable progress.

For those of you math-challenged, that’s a goal of 3 pages a day. Of course we all know that’s not how I work. Since there are four weekends of this thing (well, technically there were five, but I squandered one of them with that birthday & whale watching nonsense) I’ve calculated that I need to write 22 1/2 pages per weekend.

This past weekend I wrote 22 pages.

Not bad, eh?

I also completed, per the requirements of the challenge, an outline.

I’ve never worked from an actual written outline before. I’ve had to write them for assignments before, but what I usually do is write the whole project and then create an outline of what I’ve written.

But, I did actually write the novel, so that’s a bit of a guide.

However, stylistically, the novel and play are rather different.

So, I wrote up what I thought would be a good progression. The thing that became apparent is that I have no clue how to end this thing. I think novel endings don’t have to be as succinct or complete as play ones. Well, the ending of the NaNoWriMo version of An Alphabetical Order sucked, and I realized while working on this outline that if I’d gotten to the plotline that I wanted to cover (Maddie testifying before the Senate), I really had no clue where it was going from there.

I’m sure things will become clearer to me as I work on it more. Also, I know that there is a feedback and revision process for this challenge. So, as they say in the movies, “we’ll fix it in post.”